WHEN I GRADUATED from college, I immediately got a job as a customer service representative for Macy's at the Bayfair Mall in San Leandro, California. Four years at an institution of higher learning, fluency in French, and the ability to intelligently analyze works of art were worth, as it turned out, exactly twenty cents. They offered me $6.10 per hour, but then raised it to $6.30, citing my degree as the reason.
During my two-day training, I learned how to do everything my job didn't entail, things like operating a register, cashing out, issuing a credit, and weighing myself on the scale in the women's restroom. Then my manager took me aside and reassured me that customer service was better than the other departments. This was the career track. I was behind the counter. Work hard and you could get ahead, she said. Look at her, she'd been working that very same desk since it opened in 1957.
My department was at the end of a hallway with a dropped ceiling, fluorescent lighting, and linoleum floors that gave a distinctly Soviet-era sense of doom. I met customers at a Formica counter in the middle of which sat a button. Press it, and an old-fashioned-doorbell ding-dong could be heard in back. People loved that button. One woman came in for battle about a grease-caked pressure cooker that she wanted to return although it was years old and she had no receipt. She plunked her toddler on the counter, and he pressed the button incessantly.
"Can I help you?" Ding-dong, ding-dong.
"Yeah, this thing doesn't work (ding-dong) and they won't (ding-dong) give me another one." Ding-dong.
Behind the counter, a tall divider concealed a windowless back office with several empty desks and squeaky chairs, gray metal file cabinets, and a carpet that was once tan. This was my safe haven.
I had no idea what I was doing. Not a clue. I was the destination for people who needed authoritative answers. I couldn't tell them the store hours without looking them up. Housewares? I think it's on this floor. No, wait, maybe on the first floor. I'm sorry, hold on a second, let me look that up.
The phone was always ringing. "I just bought a set of sheets and washed them, but now I've changed my mind; can I still bring them back?" How should I know? At first I took messages, trying to research the answer and call people back. But the calls didn't stop coming. I put people on hold until they hung up. The messages piled up, and eventually I started stuffing them into my purse and throwing them away when I got home. I felt like someone had put me at the helm of a nuclear submarine. No matter what button I pushed, something was going to blow up.
On Fridays, it was my job to hand out the paychecks to my fellow employees. They stood, fingers tapping, while I leaned into the special paycheck cabinet under the counter to find their envelopes. The men seemed especially eager to help me navigate the alphabet. They'd lean over the counter and peer into the box with me. "That's F…no wait, you're on E, one more…" It took me exactly two weeks to realize they were just trying to get a better look down my shirt.
The store was always pushing credit, offering the usual "10 percent off today if you open an account with us" deal. Employees received a scratch-off game card every time someone opened an account successfully. Even I won $200, which I promptly took to the jewelry department and spent, using my employee discount, on a Movado watch.
But when someone's credit was declined-and this happened frequently-that unfortunate person was sent to me to hear the bad news. They already knew what was coming, but still they came. I could recognize the credit application as it marched toward me, clenched in someone's fist. They had no idea what could be wrong. Everything was fine. Their credit was perfect. They needed that leather sofa. "That's horrible," I'd say, feigning astonishment and indignation on their behalf. I played good cop to the credit department's bad cop. "I'm going to call those people right now and find out what's wrong."
Then I'd take the smudged, crumpled application, pick up my phone, and call the credit folks-who would proceed to tell me the real story. This guy already had three outstanding accounts with the company, all of which were in collections. He lied about his employer. He was nine months in arrears on his child support. There was a warrant out for his arrest, and I should seek shelter and call the police immediately.
My job was to listen to this information without changing my facial expression. Then I had to translate it to the person standing in front of me in such a way that he would nod and walk away instead of yelling, pleading, sobbing, or becoming physically violent. I don't have an ounce of joyful prison guard in me. I tend to voluntarily take on other people's pain and embarrassment. I felt guilty and small and horrible being the one to convey bad news to people who, more often than not, already knew it was coming. There I was, fresh from college with good credit and a job. Who was I to tell this guy he didn't deserve a new dining-room set?
But I stumbled upon a strange and liberating universal truth: Faking confidence works. The people who came to me with their dented pressure cookers and falsified credit applications? More often than not, they weren't prepared to bare their souls and walk with me, hand in hand, in pursuit of a resolution that was both just and true. No, they simply needed an answer, a definitive line in the sand, a boundary. Even if the answer was "I don't know," it needed to be presented by someone who exuded unshakable confidence. When it was, they nodded and went away. Just like that.
This was a revelation to me, but also a challenge. I wasn't raised to exude confidence. I was raised to agree, to support, and to stand out as little as possible. You may know my mother from such hits as, "What should I order?" and "Am I cold? Do I need a sweater?" Meanwhile, my father was happily tucked in the Rochester Philharmonic as second-chair oboe for more than thirty years, preferring to be eaten alive by wolves than to be singled out for a standing ovation.
Nobody taught me how to assume a position of power or authority. I can tell you how to be quietly capable, how to harbor a grudge, or how to suffer with such melodramatic martyrdom that even Meryl Streep would take notes. But stand tall and say, "Sir, you're going to have to leave or I will have security escort you out of here"-that was nowhere in my cellular makeup.
You know how it's easier to clean someone else's house than your own? Well, the same is true for emotional houses. I realized I was in a living laboratory in which nobody really knew me at all, so I could experiment at being someone else-someone who had no qualms about setting boundaries and telling people what to do. I wasn't going to stay long, so what the heck? I began to dabble in being that woman in the tidy office attire, the one whose name you never bother to remember, whose leather pumps go clickety-clack as she marches efficiently to and fro saying "yes" and "no." The more I dabbled in this alternate über-confident persona, the more smoothly everything began to go. It wasn't that I was blatantly lying to people, I was just behaving as if I knew everything.
My time at Macy's was brief. By fall I'd turned in my badge and was on my way to France for a teaching fellowship. Fake Clara was lost in translation, and I spent the next year feeling like a dreadful impostor. But I still have the Movado watch, and I still marvel at the power of fakery.
In knitting, just as in, say, piloting that nuclear submarine, faking it is really not such a good idea. "I'll just keep going and see what happens" rarely bears tasty fruit. That is how you end up with a turtleneck through which your head cannot pass, a sock with no heel, or a submarine grounded off Antarctica when you expected to be somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.
How ironic, then, that I'm back at a job where people ask me questions all the time. My inbox has become its own virtual knitting customer service desk filled with endless inquiries about yarns, fibers, patterns, breeds, shops, and places around the world. I try to answer each one, but they just keep coming, and sometimes, like those slips of paper, I have to admit defeat and hit the "delete" button. Some things I know; some things I don't. I try to help whenever I can.
Questions are a curious thing. Have you noticed that we often ask questions to which we've already decided the answer? We're just fishing to see if you choose the same answer we did. We don't really want to know what you think about the difference between Merino and alpaca, just like we don't really want to know what you think about our lousy boyfriend. No, we just want to see if you think that yellow skein would make as pretty a scarf as we do.
No matter how I answer, you'll either buy it or you won't. You'll either stay with Gary or break up with him. In fact, unless the yarn poses an immediate physical threat to you, my answer is almost irrelevant. I hope so, because the burden of making other people's decisions is too weighty for my shoulders.
When I started baking at my local café, a side gig to help me work through my apparent butter fixation, I found myself right back at the Bayfair Mall. I am not a trained chef. I'm a passionate, self-taught home baker. But all the customers saw was a person behind the counter. From day one, those old Macy's questions returned. "What's a 'milky way'?" they asked. How many shots go into a macchiato? What kind of soy milk do we use? They've handed me résumés, they've asked me to sign delivery slips, they've alerted me to a running toilet or an empty soap dispenser.
I marvel at how little a clue I have about any of it. How refreshingly terrifying. But I do remember the old routine: Stand up straight and project my ignorance in a way that instills complete confidence. People don't want to hear someone wallow in all the ways she can't help them-they want someone to nod, perhaps tell them who can help.
When I toggle between my days as an impostor-baker and the more comfortable ones as a knitting expert, the confidence part doesn't seem to be going away. What I'd assumed was total fakery on my part might actually be rooted in something, dare I say, genuine? Maybe the original lesson I learned at Macy's wasn't to fake it, like the giant fraud I felt I was, but simply to present whoever and whatever I am with confidence.
After all, did Elizabeth Zimmermann encourage us to knit on with fear and uncertainty? No. Her exact words were, "Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crises." And so I shall.
